OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between alexithymia and perinatal depressive symptoms and the stability of the alexithymia construct in a sample of low-income, predominantly Latina women during pregnancy and the early postpartum period. METHODS Seventy-seven pregnant women completed self-report questionnaires and were classified as "high risk" or "low risk"...

OBJECTIVE This study examined associations between alexithymia and objective characteristics of sleep (latencies, stages, and amount and patterning of REM sleep) that may contribute to subjective reports of poor sleep quality and impaired dream recall among alexithymic people. METHODS Fifty healthy, normally sleeping adults from the community completed the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale an...

Despite considerable research into whether face perception is impaired in autistic individuals, clear answers have proved elusive. In the present study, we sought to determine whether co-occurring alexithymia (characterized by difficulties interpreting emotional states) may be responsible for face-perception deficits previously attributed to autism. Two experiments were conducted using psychoph...

BACKGROUND Some authors have suggested that the background of alexithymia is related to affective development during early childhood. OBJECTIVE Authors studied the associations between alexithymia and childhood emotional neglect and sexual and physical abuse, also taking into account the significance of concomitant psychopathology. METHOD Associations between childhood difficulties and adul...

Studies examining the relationship between alexithymia and personality exclusively employed self-report measures of alexithymia. In the present study, we examined the relationship of both observerrated and self-reported alexithymia with the Big Five personality dimensions. We administered the Toronto Structured Interview for Alexithymia (TSIA) as an interview-based measure of alexithymia and, i...

OBJECTIVE The relationship between alexithymia and real-time momentary symptom assessments has not been reported. This cross-sectional study hypothesized that alexithymia would be a predictor of somatic symptoms using three different types of symptom measurement (momentary, recall, and retrospective) in the medically unexplained illness of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). In addition, it was hyp...

The constructs of repressive coping and alexithymia are both related to impaired emotion processing, yet individuals with a repressive coping style (repressors) score lower than controls on standard self-report measures of alexithymia. A large body of evidence indicates that repressors avoid negative affect. Therefore, the current study examined the relationship between repressive coping and al...

BACKGROUND Emotional events are followed by recurrent talking about the event (Social Sharing of Emotion, SSE). Several factors that can account for variations in beliefs about SSE were examined: alexithymia, age and sex among two sample groups, Spanish (n = 388) and Uruguayan (n = 537). METHOD Both samples completed the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) and the Beliefs about Social ...

In a 6-month follow-up study, a change in alexithymia was examined in two samples of 26 patients with panic disorder and 24 patients with social phobia. Before psychiatric treatment, the prevalence rate of alexithymia, measured by the 20-Item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), was higher for both panic disorder (54%) and social phobia (58%) groups than for healthy persons (15%). After treatmen...

Alexithymia, the inability to identify and describe one's emotional experience, is elevated in many clinical populations, and related to poor interpersonal functioning. Alexithymia is also associated with empathic deficits in individuals with autism spectrum disorders. Accordingly, a better understanding of alexithymia could elucidate the nature of social-cognitive deficits transdiagnostically....